What determines the performance of multinational corporation's global R&D activities?:Parent company vs. host country vs. home country

Many firms are trying to acquire innovative technologies and relative knowledge by offshoring R&D work. Although research to date has focused on the multinational corporations' motivations of R&D offshoring, such as cost reduction and market expansion, little is known about external or environmental factors influencing the performance of global R&D activities. We investigated the relationship between the offshore R&D performance and the technical capabilities of the parent company, the host country and the home country as enhancers from outside R&D facilities. The analysis uses European patent data and EU R&D scoreboard of 134 overseas R&D labs from 46 multinational corporations in 2005. Also, we calculated total patent number of each country for this. Results from path analysis supported our main hypothesis that the technological capabilities of the parent company and the host country positively affect the overseas R&D performances. By multi-group analysis, we also found that the relationships among the variables are different for each industry.